The white flags that mysteriously appeared atop the Brooklyn Bridge last month weren’t a prank or some sort of attack on America, according to two German men now claiming responsibility for the stunt — they were a tribute.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Berlin-based artists Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke claim they hoisted the hand-stiched flags and provided photos and videos of the stunt to back it up. In phone interviews with the newspaper, the artists insisted that they placed the flags on the bridge not out of “anti-American sentiment,” but to celebrate “the beauty of public space” in memory of the bridge’s German-born engineer, John Roebling.
July 22, the day the white flags appeared, is the anniversary of Roebling’s death.
The NYPD recently said it was making progress in its investigation into who swapped the flags, after issuing a subpoena to identify the author of the parody Twitter account @BicycleLobby. The parody account had joked that it was responsible for raising the flags and duped several news organizations.
The artists told the Times that they hadn’t expected the flag swap to generate such a strong reaction and didn’t “intend to embarrass the police.”
“Few people would care if we did the same thing in Berlin,” Leinkauf said. “Of course, we did not have the same problems with terrorism.”
Aha…Roebling was a genius. His prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge was built between Cincinnati, Oh and Covington,KY, construction started in 1856. While here Roebling is suspected of being involved in the construction of an amazing building whose interior contained the largest, unobstructed enclosed space ever built at that time. I had the luck to explore that structure before its interior was mysteriously destroyed by fire in 2001 or 2002. To achieve the vast open space floors were suspended on massive rope cables wound on huge drums at the top of the structure…entering this space felt and sounded as if I was inside a massive wooden sailing ship. I won’t bore you with this structure vast historic resume except that unknown reams of local and national history were lost when it burned and oddly (#sarcasm) that fire allowed developers to achieve goals the state historical commission had once forbidden.
I’m glad these German folks can remind America of a domestically forgotten hero.
After swapping the flags, the 2 then invaded a Czech bakery.
For some SudetenRolls?
I KNEW it was the GERMANS!
“Don’t mention the War. That’s what football is for.”
Oh, wait, they won that one!